Stockholm Photoblog

Austria’s mountain resort region of Zell am See: Eurotrip Day 03

Featured in the last episode of Band of Brothers where they play baseball in a field after taking the Eagle’s Nest, the time I spent in Zel am See and the surrounding area garnered some of the most memorable and rewarding sights of my trip.

I started at Salzburg Hbf to catch an early morning train.

It was a short ride–about two or so hours away–and I pretty much had the car to myself. According to a German woman on the train, Zell am See is pronounced like “tell am zee”.

The best part about the regional trains in Austria is that their windows can be opened, so I spent most of the time standing in front of one. The next few pictures were all taken from the train window while moving at speed.

Here’s a short video I took looking out the window.

The scenery was beautiful as we meandered through the mountains.

Just me 🙂

This scene occurred for a split second but I really like the snapshot that came out of it.

And then we arrived in town. This church is adjacent to the main square.

The main shopping street is quite small, and you can walk around and see everything in about an hour.

I walked past the train station and came upon the main attraction: Lake Zell. With the morning sun low still low in the sky, the water glistened and looked stunning.

This souvenir shop looks cool on account of the cog wheel structure below it.

Not really much to say here other than that I was walking around dumbfounded the whole time. I’ve talked to a few people who’ve gone to Austria and it seems that many just go to Vienna or Salzburg–IMO that is a tragic mistake 😉

Another tragic mistake was hitherto failing to wear sunscreen, so I was red and burned.

This panorama of the lake was taken from the grassy park area at the end of the shopping street. I find it magical that photoshop can find a way to seemingly line up water ripples from 8 separate photos taken at different times.

A little farther down the main drag there is a sort of clubhouse/restaurant overlooking a grass field and swimming pool. This place is serene.

Eventually I turned around and walked back to my hotel, to get some water and regroup.

All of the fancy pants hotels on the shopping street were way expensive, and the one I settled for sadly had no internet. And by no internet I mean literally no internet on the premise for any cost. Consequently, the next few days were some of my most productive 😀

I just noticed while writing this that in the photo above the wire that holds up that wreath thing spanning the street doesn’t line up right in the panorama… too late to fix it now :/

(…and apparently the smiley plugin I installed is lacking in the :/ department)

I decided to take the aerial tramway to the top of Mt Schmittenhöhe, which cost about 50$ but was worth every penny.

Both pictures were taken through the tram’s window, but the one below had a more egregious reflection. Perhaps I should invest in a CPL filter or something.

Also, speaking of trams, most people I see getting onto them make a huge fucking blunder of a mistake. The best place to be on a tram is the BACK window, always. It seems blindingly obvious and yet every time I get on a tram I always see people sort of naturally spread out around the edges instead of making a beeline for the back like a smart person.

Anyway here is what you see when you walk out onto the terrace.

Later in the day I had lunch at the upper restaurant.

I can’t imagine how epic it would be to go skiing in this region. I would surely love to come back in the wintertime to find out though!

Here is a picture of the map sign showing all the ski runs and lifts. Here is the pdf version from the mountain’s website.

And here’s the money shot right here. This was the hardest panorama to make, and took 40 or so pictures.

Might I humbly point out that the same picture on the mountain’s official homepage http://www.schmitten.at/ looks like muddy shit and they should have hired me instead :).

/justbeingawesome

This next video I took shows some paragliders taking off, which is cool. A bunch of people gathered around to watch and it really is a fun sight to see. This inspired me to go paragliding, which I did in fact do the next day from this very spot. That event will be covered in my next blog posting.

This might be my favorite non-panoramic photo from the whole day.

Hot damn do I wanna go skiing here! After taking this shot I walked down the path on the right towards the ski lift top station to check out the views on other side of the mountain.

This shot overlooks the town of Kaprun, the last stop of Easy Company before heading home and where they shot BoB (according to this flickr photo set).

This is basically where all the paragliders hang out to ride thermals, and where I paraglided the next day. If you hover over the photo to blow it up you can see there is a dam about 2/3 up the mountain in the center gorge, which I also visited the next day.

I kinda flubbed on this one and didn’t take enough photos to make a good panorama, and since I’m not a photoshop artist I just decided to leave it unfinished like this.

For reasons unknown to me, Zell am See is like the Islamic vacation capital of the world, and literally 50% of all women there are middle eastern tourists wearing burkas. It’s not something I got used to and was unsettling to see such oppression of women everywhere I went.

Turning the camera sideways is pretty much the height of my creativity when it comes to photography.

Paragliders high over Kaprun.

These next two panoramas are composites where you can see the stages of a hanglider and paraglider taking off.

It took a while to figure out how to do this in photoshop but I found that instead of trying to selectively crop each picture beforehand, just autoalign the layers and manually delete the portions of each layer that covers the paraglider in other layers, and then autoblend the layers after.

Yes, chicken nuggets! The same thing I had been eating every day for months I found I could order for $$$ in a restaurant, so obviously I was forced to do it.

I was amazed at how good this next shot turned out from the tram’s window. It’s actually two photos merged together, which is doubly lucky given that we were moving.

After I got back to the hotel (early afternoon), I took a nap and woke up at dinner time. I went to a restaurant and afterwords walked around with my tripod and took pictures downtown while everyone gave me stares.

I thought this was a rather provocative ad.

This souvenir shack is the same one which had the gear underneath it in the beginning of the post.

I think it was about 22:00 now but lots of people were still milling about and eating ice cream.

Just me again.

OK they had this awesome water fountain that was doing light shows and changing shapes and stuff. Every 5 minutes or so it would hold its shape for maybe 10 seconds and in that time I was able to make some panoramas. Photoshop is sorely lacking in its ability to stitch together photos at night so you have to do them manually 🙁 .